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The Chicago Maroon on Nussbaum's Berggruen Prize

Martha Nussbaum wins $1 million Berggruen Prize

Yuezhen Li
November 5, 2018
The Chicago Maroon

Martha Nussbaum, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School and in the philosophy department, won the 2018 Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture. The prize, announced last week, comes with an award of $1 million.

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Nussbaum disagrees with the idea that philosophy is an armchair discipline. Modern academia, she believes, provides a historically unparalleled level of academic freedom that radical thinkers like Rousseau, Bentham, and John Stuart Mill could only dream of.

Nussbaum is concerned, however, about the wider reach of philosophical ideas to the general public.

“The lack of interest in philosophy on the part of the media, the decline of book publishing, and the virtual extinction of general-reader journals of ideas makes it really hard to get out there into the public realm,” she wrote in an e-mail to TheMaroon.